


Tresspassing and Shower Studies; 2nd Edition

by jabedalien



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Internal Monologue, M/M, Prose Poem, Sorta kinda, Unrequited Love, idk what else to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:21:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25943506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jabedalien/pseuds/jabedalien
Summary: A re-write of Trespassing and Shower Studies.
Relationships: Abed Nadir/Jeff Winger
Comments: 11
Kudos: 49





	Tresspassing and Shower Studies; 2nd Edition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onemechanicalalligator](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onemechanicalalligator/gifts).



> so this is a sorta-kinda rewrite of my fic Trespassing and Shower Studies. it's a bit longer and more stylized like a poem than a regular fic, but I'm gonna keep both of them posted anyways. 
> 
> for onemechanicalalligator because she is just the best person ever and i love her so so much and her enthusiasm for the original really inspired me to give this another go. thank you so much i love u <3

He gets on his toes, feels along the top of the dusty doorframe. Fingertips catch a key and he settles. Feeds it to the doorknob, click and turn.

_How’d you know about that?_

The Best Friend asks.

_I know about a lot of things._

That’s a lot easier to say than

_He called me drunk. Sometimes, he calls me when he’s drunk. Never in the way I want. He just needs a ride home. I snuck out of our bedroom at three in the morning and drove over to the bar. Walked him up the stairs. I watched him fumble through his pockets before stumbling his way up the wall and grabbing this key. When he opened the door we looked at each other for a long time. I thought it felt like something was about to happen. I thought wrong. He muttered a thank you and slammed the door in my face. I stood in front of it for a long time, hoping he’d change his mind. He never changes his mind. He’s very stubborn. You knew that already._

The Best Friend rattles drawers in the kitchen. Pulls out a wine opener and plays with the arms, miming a love story without knowing it. Peeking through take-out menus and Tupperware containers. A pack of cigarettes. He didn’t know Jeff smoked. Abed did. Abed knows about a lot of things.

_I’m gonna take a shower._

The Best Friend is inspecting a loaf of bread he pulled out of the freezer.

_I bet he has a nice shower._

Abed appreciates that about The Best Friend. The way he doesn’t question him, even when he probably should.

He leans past plain white curtain to turn the knob. Stripping down as water heats up, discarding clothes in a pile. Stepping under the showerhead. There are only two bottles, shampoo and body wash. There’s more to be seen, but all that is locked in a safe under the bathroom sink. Maybe if it was him sharing this bathroom, not a rotating lineup of god knows who picked up from god knows where, there wouldn’t be a safe at all.

Cinematically, a moment when he opened it, emptied the contents onto the granite countertop and threw half of them in the garbage would work best. Abed could watch, preferably from the doorframe. Likely silently.

Better yet, a slow progression played out over a short song. Toothbrush, razor, then cologne join the hand soap. A shot as bottles are added to the bare shelves in the shower. Maybe not much of it is thrown away, but the outcome would stay the same. The only thing that’s even significant in there plotwise are the anti-aging pills. Abed would tell him that.

Because there wouldn’t have to be a safe for whatever horrible truths lived locked away here. He didn’t mind them. In fact, he liked them quite a bit.

(Abed had truths to lock away too, in stories about bone saws and metaphorical lockers, silicone dolls with foam bodies over ball-and-socket armatures, being alone on a ship with one other passenger, flying through space but never stopping anywhere.)

But also because

_Who the hell does that, anyway?_

A person that guarded could only be loved by someone lost to the absolute fantasy of knowing them well enough to see their face wash.

He poured the soap in his hands, a quarter sized puddle too small for its absence to be noted, because he was never here, not really. Applied the suds to his body before putting his hand close to his face, knowing the smell well enough already.

The only reason he’d done this was because when the shampoo was running in streams down his back, he could imagine the two of them were close enough for Abed to be casually using his shower. When the shampoo rivers cleared he turned the heat up a few notches. Laid on his back, feet braced flat against the wall. The rainfall was centered over his face and that was how he liked it, a constant barrage, suffocating as he tried to breathe around it.

Did he do this sometimes? Lay down in the shower with hot water scalding his skin for so long that it started feeling cold, long enough to make someone think that maybe none of this is real? He definitely doesn’t. He’d think it was weird. He usually thinks Abed is weird. That was fine. Abed thought he was very, very weird, even if it was only on the inside. That may have been his favorite thing about him, actually.

He had a hand on his ribs and another on his thigh, considering putting one or the other between his legs before deciding this was pathetic enough already. Jeff’s shower might be the temporary set of a syndicated sitcom’s worth of reverie, but he would still have to look him in the eye on Monday.

Thresholds had already been crossed, hidden apartment keys and white bathroom tile and endlessly bare walls. Crossing another might push the narrative a stitch too far.

Lust was just one of a million overlapping emotions he felt for Jeff, tumbling around in a stormy cloud that lives above his head. Admiration, connection, and infatuation thrown in there along with your everyday carnal desire. Giving into the lust only corrupted all the other feelings, the ones that kept the plot rolling, the ones that made the audience think about them after the screen went black. Abed knew this, used it to push away the temptation. So his fingertips felt bony ribcage instead.

After a bottle episode of tables flipped on their sides, monkeys turned to ghosts and notebooks of uncomfortable revelation, Jeff had been witness to far too much bare skin.

Or not quite enough, depending on context.

Regardless, it gave way to

_Did you eat today?_

asked across the lunchroom table on days where everything on his tray was repulsive and only good for being kicked around with a fork. He’d always say yes.  
He’d nearly always be lying. The Ark of the Covenant would look at him, lashes fluttering over blue glass, because she knew better. But she never said anything.

Better yet were the days when he had not in fact eaten, and the food was shockingly less than repulsive. But the idea of doing so while watched by a family of keen eyes made him want to unzip his skin and leave it on the bench.

And then the question again, and he wanted to answer

_You never eat._

_What, you thought I didn’t notice?_

_I always notice._

Add a line about _projection_ , or _displacement_ , or something legitimate-sounding with the word _complex_ following it, a buzzword to make The Therapist whip her head around and pull the camera focus. But he never said anything.

Maybe Jeff cried in the shower. But it was more likely Abed only imagined this because that was the only place he ever let himself cry.  
He wasn’t now, and sort of wanted to be, almost hated himself for not. Willing tears to mix with the water drowning him before they even left his eyes. That way its almost like it never happened, right? He was never really here, anyways.

Jeff hadn’t ever cried in front of him. He’d come close a few times, only when they were alone. Making a believably drunk phone call in Abed’s dorm room, after watching a scene intercut with footage of him freaking out, their first Christmas when he still couldn’t understand why people treated Abed like that, after two failed Thanksgiving dinners.  
The instance he thought about the most was from a misguided attempt to explain how badly Abed needed him. Maybe only a half-real conversation, but the pools in his eyes, dangerously close to overflowing before being wiped away by a shirtsleeve, had been far too real. He’d elected to ignore it. Abed had never been the kind that knew how to respond, especially not when the other was acting out of character.

The wish to see him cry was a bit dark for syndicated sitcom daydreams, would do better streaming or on HBO. He wished it anyway. The scene was already scripted. He would wrap an arm around his shoulder, and the audience would note that he was less stiff than usual. Wouldn’t say anything, because the arm is already pushing it and he’s not about to jump the shark. He liked to think the two of them were beyond words anyways.

In a later scene, he’d tell Jeff he would love him no matter what he looked like, because he was more than a bad grade in a tight sweater or a Halloween costume from when he was a kid (though he was pretty, and he could say that too).

What Jeff told him over that table were the things he thought about awake at night sometimes, lying in bed, eyes closed but his mind more active than ever, wondering if he’d fallen asleep yet, if he was doing okay, if he’d feel better or safer or more loved with Abed next to him.

He’d remind himself that Jeff was probably asleep, that whether he was doing okay was debatable at best, but that he wasn’t ever going to make him feel any of those things.

It didn’t stop him from trying to write one of those moments, where he was open, find somewhere in the already-bloated script to fit it in, (they could spare a minute, Pierce always had too much screentime) that way he can reach in and take out the part of Jeff that everyone else broke. Then he’d find that part of himself and take it out too. Finding it would be easy. Showing it to him would not be. Abed would do it anyway.

He’d put them in the palm of his hand, right next to each other. They wouldn’t be identical, not quite. Complementary instead.

He would say

_We’re not so different, you and I. Isn’t it funny?_

Jeff would be upset for a minute, at everything looking so raw. But then he would laugh despite himself, the irony of two broken hearts that fit together perfectly not lost on him. Irony was never lost on him. So he’d pick up Abed’s piece, gingerly, hold it flat in his outstretched hand, then close it up and put it in his pocket. Abed could do the same, and they could make a very perfect trade.

Whether the piece they got in exchange was better or worse, well that was debatable at best. What exactly was the difference between two fathers that didn’t want them, when one was able to leave and the other had no choice but to stay? Abed wasn’t sure. He’d be willing to find out.

He’d been in here way too long, he realizes. Forces himself out from under the water, still burning but now he’s used to it, now everything outside the shower is impossibly cold.

The soap is clinging to the mist in the air, making the whole room smell like him. It’s intoxicating, same way it is when Jeff pulls him into a hug. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens sometimes, and that counts for something. Abed really, really, likes to think it counts for something.

Abed stepped out of the shower and looked into the bathroom mirror.

_You’re Special_

He read it a hundred times over, hating it more and more each time. Hated the fact that the only person he heard that from was his finger against the bathroom mirror. Hated that he didn’t believe it, or else it wouldn’t be written there in the first place.

What was it that he’d said that night?

_Nine out of ten lies occur six inches away from the bathroom mirror._

For a moment, he considered taking post-it notes from the kitchen, he’d seen them in the junk drawer when The Best Friend opened it, next to a pen stolen from the bank. He‘d take them both in here, write exactly why he thought Jeff was special on each one, stick them on the mirror until there wasn’t a reflection to look at. There were more than enough reasons to take up the whole bathroom, so he would move out into the rest of the apartment, filling empty walls.

_You brought our family together._

_You stuck up for me._

_You get my references._

_You don’t need me to grow or change._

_You told me about your dad._

_You always know what to say._

Because Abed never, ever, knew what to say.

Mostly he wanted to grab Jeff by the shoulder and shake him, ask him why the hell he even thought like this in the first place (he could take some guesses). Tell him that of course he was special. That he was the most special person Abed had ever met. That if he wanted, Abed could tell him how special he was every day for the rest of their lives.

Would that fix his broken piece? Abed wasn’t sure. He’d be willing to find out.

Looking in the mirror made him irrationally angry, and he felt like acting the way Jeff probably would. Kicking things around and tearing pages out of the old textbooks in Jeff’s desk and screaming into a pillow. Take out the nice knives in Jeff’s kitchen. They’re sharp, they sit in a wooden block on the counter, unused. Jeff can’t cook. Abed’s a deceptively good cook.

He'd use them to slice open all the couch cushions and throw the stuffing everywhere. Climb up on a chair so he can tear the curtains to ribbons . When he was done with the knives he would embed them in the wood of the kitchen table. Stab a few times for good measure. Spackle over them like scars in the study table he made with a fire ax. Good as new. Then he’d lay in the mess until Jeff came to rescue him.

He settled for drying himself off. The towel was folded on a rack, and he put it back exactly how it was, a reminder he was never really here. Pulled rumpled clothes from the floor and put them back on. Walked out of the room, steam spilling behind him, and settled for chucking a pillow off the bed across the room. It hit the opposite wall and fell with a small thud, and it was nowhere close to the satisfaction he was looking for.

What he wanted was to smash all the dishes and play with the pieces as they sliced the palms of his hands. But he walked over and picked the pillow up again, replaced it (he was never really here).

Out of curiosity he opened the nightstand drawer. No shock at the half-empty bottle of scotch all alone in there, just disappointment. He put his head on the pillow, on his back over the covers, looking up at the ceiling. This was the side Jeff slept on, at least he figured so judging by the placement of the bottle. He couldn’t help closing his eyes and imagining himself waking up one morning on the opposite side. If he did, would the drawer in the bedside table be empty?

He felt the shift of the mattress as The Best Friend joined him, perched on the edge of the bed.

_Do you want to talk about why we came here?_

_I don’t think so._

_That’s fine._

It reminded him of exactly why The Best Friend was _The _Best Friend, not just his. There wasn’t a better one, Abed was sure of that. There wasn’t one who knew without him saying a word, probably having known for longer than Abed himself. There wasn’t one who could leave the conversation at that, to a few words exchanged and a gentle hand reassuring his shoulder. One who deserved better than to hear all the immature, hopeless ranting, but would still listen for hours if he asked him to.__

____

_Do you want to go now?_

____

He blinked his eyes open, banishing his thoughts to the far back part of his brain where movies are written. Nodded, and The Best Friend looked down with his perfect smile.

____

They check each room for any signs that they’d ever really been here. In the kitchen, he pulls out the sticky notes and the pen. Puts a finger up to pause The Best Friend, halfway out the door, and rushes back to the bedroom. Leans over the nightstand.

____

_Call me please._

____

_P.S._

____

_I think you're special._

____

No signature needed. Jeff knew his handwriting by now. From character sheets, Spanish notes, and history tests slid along desktops while the professor is distracted, probably looking down a girl’s shirt.

____

Carefully lifts the scotch and presses the note to the bottom of the drawer, replaces the bottle directly over it. Wonders when it’ll be found.

____

He can’t decide whether or not this counts as a love letter. Jeff won’t ever think it’s a love letter, at least not in the way Abed means it, but he’s writing it with love, and maybe that’s enough.

____

Abed knows that he’s shattering the illusion he worked so hard on, destroying his own carefully crafted script, but he’s okay with it. Because he was never really here, except for the fact that he was.

____

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! this is in no way my usual style but i really really loved trying this out.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Introduction to Inebriation and Insecurity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26029276) by [aw_writing_no](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aw_writing_no/pseuds/aw_writing_no)




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